Читать книгу Collected Essays - Brian Aldiss - Страница 23

In my lifetime, I have read only one story by H. P. Lovecraft. Yet that story I remember well, if only because I came upon it shortly after my twin brother committed suicide.

Somehow, talk of Lovecraft implies hushed talk of the past—awful attics or seedy cellars in which dreadful things lurk, waiting to emerge from long ago or far away, or both. From what I have heard, it is useless for anyone in the Lovecraftian universe to struggle. Lift a finger, and evil forces will come busting in. It was with compulsion greater than myself that I decided I must—whether I liked it or not—read once more that special story of his which has remained with me throughout so many years.

So, bearing a flambeau, I climb the stairs to a dusty attic where my precious few books are kept. On the way, I ponder the kindly if damp spirit of Lovecraft. This was the man who once declared, in words to be echoed by HAL in the movie 2001 almost half a century later, ‘Existence seems of little value and I wish it might be terminated’.

Remembrance told me how L. Sprague de Camp, in his 1975 biography of Lovecraft, had quoted the master as announcing that mankind were ‘wolves, hyenas, swine, fools, and madmen’. What sort of wisdom might we not expect from a man who had torn thus aside the tissue of lies behind which we hide our frailties? Even as I reached the chill attic, pulling my shawl more securely round my shoulders, I was aware of fear welling up inside me in a cascade of adjectives.

There on an upper shelf … I reach out … ah!, got it! That aged black book, from which I blow the dust. I open its pages with trembling fingers.

No, no, it’s not the Necronomicon, Cthulhu be praised! It’s a volume entitled Modern Tales of Horror, selected by Dashiell Hammett. The volume was published in London in 1932, by Victor Gollancz.

A precocious lad, I was seven when I bought it. For many years, it was my favourite book—favourite because it scared the life out of me. Also precious to me because at that age I was trying to become on good terms with my mother, and discovered that she was not averse to a good horror story. So I read aloud to her in our scullery while she did the ironing.

Two stories in the Hammett collection I read over and over. They were Paul Suter’s ‘Beyond the Door’ and Michael Joyce’s ‘Perchance to Dream’. (Thirty years later, I included that marvellous latter story in my Best Fantasy Stories, published by Faber & Faber.) We both trembled, my mother and I, in those long cosy peacetime afternoons. As long as she kept ironing and I kept reading, she never said another word about sending me off to an orphanage.

One story in the Hammett collection made us scream. It was ‘The Music of Erich Zann’, written by H. P. Lovecraft. We screamed with laughter. After all these years, it’s hard to see why we found it so funny; of course, it was a nervous time for us: the police were still investigating. The very name of Erich Zann broke us up. Then again, Zann, the crazy old musician, played a viol. Come on, guys, viola is serious. Violin is serious. Viol is FUNNY! Sounds like VILE, right?

This is my dictionary’s definition of a viol: ‘held between the knees when played’. You imagine someone playing a kind of violin, gripping it with his knees … I was also reading funnies to my mother, to keep her amiable, like Saki and Stephen Leacock. You remember Leacock’s ‘My Financial Career’? That broke us up. I thought she would have one of her fits. Lovecraft’s story is a kind of ‘My Musical Career’. I know that what I am saying will offend the devout, and that it just goes to show I was a hopeless neurotic aged seven, but that’s how it was. That’s what Zann did up in that peaked garret. Anyone for masturbation fantasies?

How was Zann’s playing on this instrument of his? Fantastic, delirious, hysterical, is the answer. Okay, but later? Oh, later, the frantic playing became a blind mechanical unrecognizable orgy, is the answer. And what was Zann doing while he played? He was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a monkey, is the answer. You see, he was playing a wild Hungarian dance. Hence the uncanny perspiration. Are all Hungarian dances like that? Hope not, is the answer.

Something broke the glass and came in through the window while Zann was in this state. We never figured out what actually came in, apart from the blackness—though it’s true blackness screamed with shocking music. The Hungarians at it again, we supposed. Mother loved that bit. Perhaps she was thinking that my so-called father might be going to break in and attack us again. The idea certainly entered my mind. There was an hysterical edge to our laughter. Even as I read, I was dripping with uncanny perspiration.

It’s all so long ago. We were living in New England then. How foolish we were, how innocent, how—unread!

Even now, grey-haired and no longer quite so neurotic, I still see how whole sentences in that wonderful story must have struck those two 1930s idiots as funny. ‘My liking for him did not grow.’ ‘I had a curious desire to look out of that window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the glittering roofs and spires which must lie outspread there.’ Well, all I can say is that when we looked out of our kitchen window we gazed down unseen slopes onto a banana yard.

To top it all, poor old Erich Zann was dumb and deaf. We had no idea of political correctness in our house. We were Presbyterians. We found deafness funny, particularly in a musician. (Beethoven was not on our curriculum.) Funny too, we thought in our perverted way, was the fate that overcame the old deaf wistful shabby grotesque strange satyrlike distorted nearly bald—with what youthful zeal I shouted out the adjectives!—viol-player. There’s the divinely hilarious moment when the unnamed hero feels ‘strange currents of wind’ and clutches Zann’s ice-cold stiffened unbreathing face, whose bulging eyes bulged uselessly into the void. I could hardly get the words out. Mother burnt a pair of pink bloomers with the iron.

Jesus, how we laughed. How silly I was at seven. Didn’t know a bit of good hokum when I saw it …